It's not that surprising to me. My friends and I compared offers out of college and then didn't talk at all about salary for over a decade. A couple years ago, I started asking around when I was considering a job offer. I found out that we were making anywhere from 60k to 115k! We all had the same years of experience (~12 years). We all had different specialties, but that didn't really seem to matter. The guys who stuck with one job at a small-to-medium company seemed to do the worst--five percent raises don't exactly cause your salary to skyrocket. Those of us who worked at big companies did better, probably because the big companies make an effort to do salary surveys and pay competitive wages. Those of us who worked for consulting firms or changed jobs a few times did the best.